Agent-based approach to investors' behavior and asset price fluctuation in financial markets

Abstract

In this paper, we use Agent-Based Approach to analyze how asset prices are affected by investors and investment systems that are based on Behavioral Finance. We build a virtual financial market that contains two types of investors: fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. As a result of intensive experiments in the market, we find that (1) the traded price agrees with the fundamental value and the fundamentalists survive according to the principle of natural selection in the case that the market contains the same number of fundamentalists and trend predictors (investors who make trend prediction), (2) the traded price largely deviates from the fundamental value and the non-fundamentalists frequently obtain excess returns and therefore the fundamentalists are eliminated according to the principle of natural selection in the case that the proportion of trend predictors is extremely high or in the case that the investment ratio of the risk asset is restricted, and (3) the traded price largely deviates from the fundamental value in the case that the non-fundamentalists estimate the losses excessively, as pointed in Prospect Theory. These results indicate that the non-fundamentalists affect the traded prices and obtain excess returns also in real markets.